VfL Wolfsburg turns ChatGPT into a club-wide capability

At VfL Wolfsburg, football is built on discipline, continuity, and trust. For nearly three decades, the club has been a constant presence in the Bundesliga—backed by strong men’s and women’s teams, a future-oriented academy, and a fast-evolving digital and commercial ecosystem.

But modern football is no longer defined by performance on the pitch alone. Expectations from fans, partners, and internal stakeholders continue to rise—while budgets and headcount cannot scale indefinitely.

This tension between growing expectations and limited scalability created a clear need for new ways of working. The question was how to apply it in a way that felt credible in one of the world’s most heritage-driven sectors.

“In football, tradition is an important value. Change isn’t always easy. But innovation is part of our DNA—and we couldn’t just keep adding people while the workload kept growing.”

Linus Lebugle, Head of Business Development

Across the club, the same challenges kept appearing:

• Repetitive drafting, translation, reporting, and documentation slowed teams down

• Critical knowledge sat with a few specialists, creating bottlenecks

• External agencies handled routine work, but at high cost and without building internal capability

These challenges highlighted a core tension: the club needed to increase impact and consistency—without increasing headcount.

Why ChatGPT Enterprise

After evaluating multiple tools and approaches, VfL Wolfsburg chose ChatGPT Enterprise for a combination of reasons.

Over the previous year, the club had already built meaningful experience with Generative AI, working with ChatGPT Team and Business licenses. Trained teams, established use cases, and visible day-to-day impact demonstrated clear value, but scaling was limited by access and governance.

“Once we saw trained teams, real use cases, and measurable impact, the question wasn’t whether AI works,” says Lebugle. “The question was how to scale it properly and responsibly across the entire organization.”